The White House is slamming the New York Post for circulating a video on social media, and later a cover story, claiming that President Joe Biden wandered off while he and other world leaders were watching a skydiving demonstration at the G7 summit in Italy.
The Post video included the message: “President Biden appeared to digress at the G7 summit in Italy, with officials having to pull him back to focus.”
But White House spokesman Andrew Bates noted that the video the Post shared was cropped, missing the context of what Biden was doing: speaking and congratulating another skydiver while some of the other world leaders held a separate diver observed.
Bates shared the video from a broader perspective, writing: “The Murdoch stores are so eager to distract @POTUS‘s record that they’re just lying. Here they use an artificially narrow frame to hide from the viewers the fact that he has just seen a skydiving demonstration. He congratulates one of the divers and gives him a thumbs up.” Bates also shot the Post’s video edit.
The video was shared via media on the right, also for a digital story written for The National Desk of Sinclair Broadcast Group for placement on local station websites. That story was picked up in the Post’s cropped video. The story also referred to claims about an incident last week involving Biden during D-Day celebrations. The video showed Biden pausing before sitting down, in what right-wing figures said was the president’s confusion over a non-existent chair. In fact, a longer version of the video shows the president pausing as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was about to be introduced. The video then showed Biden taking his seat in that spot.
The New York Post also put the G7 incident on the cover of its print edition, with the headline “Meander in Chief.”
Bates later wrote of X: “Rupert Murdoch remains jealous of a younger man running a more complex operation.”
A spokesperson for the Post, which is owned by News Corp., did not return a request for comment, and a spokesperson for News Corp.
“Beware of cheap fakes … and any bad faith actors who post them,” wrote White House communications director Ben LaBolt.
Last week, Sinclair stations picked up a story in The Wall Street Journal reporting that Biden was “slipping,” with reports of the president during certain meetings with lawmakers. But the White House and other critics noted that the story included only one critical on-the-record source, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
The Popular Information site curated videos van Sinclair is present in several markets and reads identical texts about the Journal story. Morning Joeamong other things, showed the compilation.
Sinclair called the criticism “outrageous and insulting” and claimed it had “exposed this story from both sides of the political aisle.” The script included some of the Democrats’ backlash to the Journal story. The channel group also defended the use of the same script across channels, calling it a “common industry practice” and noting that affiliates “often use a pre-produced script for a package provided by another media source.
